Tag: Regulation

After crafting the initial features of the post-crisis bank-regulatory framework, global and U.S. policy-makers were dumbfounded to discover that costly new rules changed the competitive financial-market balance. Mirabile dictu, when costs rose for banks, banks changed their business model to cling to as much investor return as possible instead of, as regulators apparently expected, taking it on the chin to ensure ongoing financial-service delivery at whatever pittance of a profit remained. As markets rapidly and in some cases radically redefined themselves, global regulators dubbed the beneficiaries of this new competitive landscape “shadow banks.” At themost recent meeting of the FSB Plenary, they changed shadow banks to the less stealthy moniker of “non-bank financial intermediaries.” A newBIS working papershortens the scope of shadow banking to “market-based finance,” going on to assess a fundamental question: does the transformation of financial intermediation from banks to non-banks alter the income and equality landscape? The answer: It’s complicated.Continue reading “This Little Equality Goes to Market”→

Starting in 2010, U.S. regulators erected a pyramid of complex, costly, and stringent safety-and-soundness, resolution-planning, and conduct regulations for the largest U.S. banking organizations that have come to be called SIFIs (i.e., systemically-important financial institutions). Starting in 2018, the agencies began to demolish the still-incomplete SIFI pyramid, issuing on October 31 two sweeping proposals (here and here) not only to implement new U.S. law, but also to go farther. Bankers say this is nice, but not enough; critics lambast the proposals as forerunners of the next financial crisis. Either could be right – the proposals repeat the most fundamental mistake of post-crisis financial regulation: rules piled upon rules or, now, rules subtracted from rules without even an effort to anticipate how all of the revised rules work taken altogether in the financial marketplace as it exists in the real world, not in a set of academic papers or political edicts. Continue reading “SIFIs and Sisyphus: The Latest Bank-Regulation Rewrite”→

On May 23, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) issued a bulletin allowing national banks into the short-term, small dollar lending often stigmatized as payday lending. The policy shift is intended to spur regulated banks into a business prone to predatory practice, thus giving vulnerable borrowers a better way to tide them over short-term financial hardships. Will banks start making short-term, small-dollar loans now that they have the OCC’s blessing? Not if they can’t find a way to make money.

On Tuesday, FRB Chairman Powell delivered a strongly-positive statement on the state of the U.S. economy. Citing factors such as recent wage growth and employment, Mr. Powell is far more worried about keeping the good times going than about how inequitably the good times deliver the goodies across the gaping U.S. income and wealth divide. This is setting monetary and regulatory policy the same way a diver looking only at a calm, blue surface jumps into a lake and breaks his neck. Continue reading “Still Economic Waters Hide Lurking Danger”→

On January 10, the Wall Street Journalconfirmed that Trump Administration regulators plan to advance the reforms to the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) first outlined in a 2017 Treasury Department report. The CRA dates backs to an era when progressive Democrats controlled federal financial regulation and is now a hallowed artifact of policy that progressives believe advances economic equality. Community advocates and many Democrats will thus cry foul as this Trump Administration initiative begins. Are they right? Does the CRA really advance economic equality? Continue reading “How to Turn CRA into a Positive Force for Economic Equality”→